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Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster

http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/201...omeless_n_4518695.html?utm_hp_ref=mostpopular

"n what appears to be a horrific abuse of some of Japan's most desperate and vulnerable people, homeless men are reportedly being recruited to clean up the crippled Fukushima nuclear plant.
The destitute are said to be the most likely to accept minimum wage for what is probably one of the most undesirable jobs in the world.

One of the recruiters has explained how he is sourcing potential labourers for the world's worst nuclear disaster since Chernobyl."
 
Running out of pensioner volunteers?
The retired engineer is reporting back for duty at the age of 72, and he is organising a team of pensioners to go with him.

For weeks now Mr Yamada has been getting back in touch with old friends, sending out e-mails and even messages on Twitter.

Volunteering to take the place of younger workers at the power station is not brave, Mr Yamada says, but logical.

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Mr Yamada has been getting back in touch with old friends via e-mail and even messages on Twitter
"I am 72 and on average I probably have 13 to 15 years left to live," he says.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-pacific-13598607
"Even if I were exposed to radiation, cancer could take 20 or 30 years or longer to develop. Therefore us older ones have less chance of getting cancer
Click to expand...
 
I'm not sure as the elderly volunteers were ever taken up on their 2011 offer.

As for the stuff about homeless people bring recruited etc, that would not be surprising. Because it sounds very much like certain roles within Japans nuclear industry have been filled in this way for many years before the Fukushima disaster. Such as very poor people being contracted to do some of the nastiest routine jobs. For example, cleaning inside the reactor vessel during certain kinds of routine maintenance. And the problems with gangsters operating in many regions and types of business seems fairly prevalent, although as an outsider it would be easy for me to make assumptions about this that I cannot easily check and balance.

Lets be clear that there are several very different types of workers at Fukushima. A lot of the work, apart from the danger and contamination, is along the lines of standard manual labour, cleaning and construction jobs, and is being contracted out in the usual way with the usual horrors. Certain tasks, such as moving the fuel from the pools, requires the sort of skilled nuclear labour that works in the industry on a more permanent basis in normal times. Due to the contamination and associated worker radiation dose-rates at Fukushima, they are having problems with the pool of potential workers for these skilled roles shrinking quite quickly. Many people have used up their entire lifetimes worth of legally permissible radiation exposure, and can't work at Fukushima or at other plants again as a result. There has been some dodginess on this front at times too, e.g. fiddling the system so that the recorded doses for a worker are lower than what they've actually been exposed to. And sometimes the workers themselves will go along with this because this relatively-well paid work is not available to them once their dose numbers hit a certain level.
 
Just spotted this story about nuke leaks in South Carolina - no earthquake required.

I reckon we'll see a lot more of this sort of thing over the coming years as nuke facilities start to show their age. (just like the anti-nuke campaigners of the 60's & 70's said they would)

Maybe we should have a "nuke fuck-ups near you" thread?
 
Dr Jon said:
Just spotted this story about nuke leaks in South Carolina - no earthquake required.

I reckon we'll see a lot more of this sort of thing over the coming years as nuke facilities start to show their age. (just like the anti-nuke campaigners of the 60's & 70's said they would)

Maybe we should have a "nuke fuck-ups near you" thread?
Click to expand...

Better source: http://www.wltx.com/news/story.aspx?storyid=260884

Barnwell is a low-level waste storage site. Not seen any figures yet but I'm expecting it to be releasing much less tritium than Fukushima is.

MVC-009S.jpg
 
Its a lot more than that ....5 shut down reactors and a new mox plant for reprocessing , construction started in 2007 at a projected cost of $ 4.9 bn and was due to open last year , for an operational life of 40 years , its now 3 years behind hitting a now projected $ 8bn at 60% completion. Due to continuing cost overruns and the reprocessing market bombing post fuku, it may close before its been fully completed in 2016 ( est). With substantial penalty clause payments for cancellation to the builders.

Its dirty thirty done on an American scale.

The plume may supply some awkward information for the fracking companies, as waste injection wells have been used , the trituim spread is easily detectable and from a defined source (not natural) , as it spreads through the strata at measurable rates and into the water table and river .Its progress can be tracked providing a real live , not theoretical, working model of casement / impermeable block failure and aquifer contamination. That will be difficult to surpress by secrecy clauses due to its danger to public health and independent monitoring by the water companies.
 
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Tankus said:
Its a lot more than that ....5 shut down reactors and a new mox plant for reprocessing...
Click to expand...

Beg pardon. The tritium is from the waste, though?

Tankus said:
The plume may supply some awkward information for the fracking companies, as waste injection wells have been used , the trituim spread is easily detectable and from a defined source (not natural) , as it spreads through the strata at measurable rates and into the water table and river .Its progress can be tracked providing a real live , not theoretical, working model of casement / impermeable block failure and aquifer contamination. That will be difficult to surpress by secrecy clauses due to its danger to public health and independent monitoring by the water companies.
Click to expand...

Hmm... does the geology in any way resemble tight gas?
 
Dr Jon said:
Just spotted this story about nuke leaks in South Carolina - no earthquake required.

I reckon we'll see a lot more of this sort of thing over the coming years as nuke facilities start to show their age. (just like the anti-nuke campaigners of the 60's & 70's said they would)

Maybe we should have a "nuke fuck-ups near you" thread?
Click to expand...
And what the current antifrackers say ....3 decades or less from now ,

its already starting
 
laptop said:
Beg pardon. The tritium is from the waste, though?
Yep , just saying the site is a lot more than just for waste. .


Hmm... does the geology in any way resemble tight gas?
Click to expand...


Waste injection wells are supposed to be deeper and capped by multiple layers of more impermeable rock....also cased to a higher standard than fracking wells.

And if its surface spillage into the water table , theres another real model of mobility through the permeable substrate. When countless theoretical models said that it couldn't.

Got to have some repercussions don't you think?

Edit
Hmm. From 2009
http://pubs.usgs.gov/sir/2009/5245/
 
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No, thats not right. They certainly revealed that a couple of damaged fuel bundles (that were damaged many years ago) are in the reactor 4 pool, but it didn't really change their plans for removing the rest of the fuel from the reactor 4 spent fuel pool. They started on November 18th and it will be ongoing till towards the end of the year.

They are now about a 10th of the way through the process. 154 out of 1533 fuel assemblies/bundles have been removed so far. This is from the official company page that details the progress:

http://www.tepco.co.jp/en/nu/fukushima-np/removal4u/index-e.html
 
I see some sections of the press are giving some brief attention to Fukushima again in the run-up to the anniversary.

For example this Guardian piece about how contaminated water may eventually be released into the ocean:

http://www.theguardian.com/environm...hima-operator-dump-contaminated-water-pacific

Certainly I am not surprised by this view, given the amount of water in question and the difficulties storing it all. Especially when they are talking about water thats had the bulk of radioactive substances other than tritium removed. I would really like a world utterly free of nuclear contamination, but people paying attention to these sorts of stories about the possible future for the water at Fukushima should investigate how much tritium is allowed to be released from nuclear plants under normal operating conditions for some alarming perspective.

I also strongly disagree with the following in the article:

The Fukushima Daiichi plant's manager, Akira Ono, said the firm had no plans to release contaminated water into the Pacific, but agreed that decommissioning would remain on hold until the problem was solved.

"The most pressing issue for us is the contaminated water, rather than decommissioning," he said.

"Unless we address this issue the public will not be assured and the evacuees will not be able to return home.
Click to expand...

Of course the water is the most pressing issue, but he isn't quite saying that this stuff places the decommissioning on hold. The decommissioning, to the extent that it will eventually prove possible, is a multi-decade process where lots of pieces of the jigsaw won't fall into place for many years, if ever. And their plan for decommissioning actually involves certain steps which would alter the water equations on site if they could manage these steps. i.e. somehow making the containment waterproof again so they can fill it up with water to a certain level to act as radioactive shielding before using technology that currently doesn't exist to remove fuel fragments from the vessel. If they ever manage the waterproofing then it will happen to change the nature of the water-cooling setup they currently have on-site, it would become a properly closed loop for a start.

And although the water stuff is a drain on resources, it mostly isn't using the same human etc resources that are necessary for other kinds of skilled nuclear work on site. There are different types of workers on site and solving the water storage issue doesn't free up the human resources necessary to do much of the actual decommissioning work.

As for the last sentence about public assurance and evacuees returning home, thats a bit iffy too. If all the contaminated water magically vanished tomorrow it would only reveal all the other areas that the public could turn their attention towards instead, and away from the site perimeter it would make no difference to the radiation levels that actually prevent people returning.

In conclusion I would say that the water gets a lot of attention because its one of the most graspable and immediate issues, and one that a failure to manage properly can be immediately noticed and TEPCO criticised for. But there are plenty more which lurk, with much longer timescales and far fewer accurate numbers that can be reported on accurately without too much effort.
 
It's impossible to read the ludicrous headlines that site pumps out every day and actually manage to retain the sense of shouty urgency that it attempts to foster. I have used it at times to discover new articles, but I can never take the way it presents them seriously.

Many things could yet go wrong on site, but 'hanging by its fingernails' is a spectacularly bad analogy. Nobody hangs by their fingernails off the edge of anything for close to three years ffs.
 
Best explanation that I've seen over the water problem

Some frankly disturbing conclusions in the end

Fukushima Daiichi's: Hidden Crises Radioactive Wa…:

The graphics are excellent explaining the robot footage

It may be 50 years before they can get at the source of the leaks , and even then they may not have a solution

""Fukushima may end up in being to Chernobyl , what Chernobyl was to TMI...""

Christ !
 
Tankus said:
"Fukushima may end up in being to Chernobyl , what Chernobyl was to TMI..."

Christ !
Click to expand...

Have they found shedloads of radioactivity not otherwise reported? If not, that's a bit overblown. It's somewhere in between Ch and TMI, isn't it?
 
Its the potential , particularly what's coming after the high tritium levels found in the monitoring wells , already moving in the groundwater , The plant is built on an historical water course ...
They frankly don't know how to proceed, and admit that they are still at the beginning of the disaster,
......it was quoted to be worse than Chernobyl due to the tonnage involved and the expectation of the contamination volume of release to the environment ,when they run out of tank storage and the plume from the cores hits the dock.
 
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Could do with an explanation of what you mean by when the plume from the cores hits the docks.

Meanwhile from the comedy ineptitude department, which is alive and well at Fukushima, at least for the non-nuclear fuel part of the operation...

http://ex-skf.blogspot.co.uk/2014/04/fukushima-i-npp-tank-alarm-didnt-sound.html

TEPCO revealed on April 9 that the water gauges on 433 tanks out of 1000 tanks that store contaminated water at Fukushima I Nuclear Power Plant had been set so that there would be no sound even if an alarm was sounded to indicate abnormal water levels. On April 8, some water gauges malfunctioned and alarms were issued, but since there was no sound [the workers] didn't notice for two hours.

According to TEPCO, an alarm goes off when the water level rises or drops rapidly. However, the sound of the PC that controls all water gauges was set "off". When the highly contaminated water leaked in February this year, the alarm did go off. TEPCO believes the sound setting was changed to "off" after the February incident, and says they are investigating whether the sound was turned off by mistake.
Click to expand...
 
Its in the vid ....definite air of suppressed panic ..... Tank farms nearly at Max capacity anyway , so if it ain't leaking now , they are going to open the valves by this summer before the typhoon season sets in ...
 
With much of the subsequent focus tending towards fears of fresh problems or disasters on the site, and the pro v anti nuclear debate often trapped in a presently unsolvable disagreement about the likely health impacts (thats often more about trust issues than scientific data), I continue to believe that more focus should be placed on the human cost of the evacuations. The sort of issue that the likes of Monbiot notably avoided when penning pieces in favour of nuclear power that relied on the downplaying of Fukushima's impact on people, and contrasting that image with the negative impact of coal on humanity.

So I was glad to see this piece in the Guardian which dwelled on the plight of the evacuees.

Fukushima nuclear disaster: three years on 120,000 evacuees remain uprooted
Click to expand...
Japan's 2011 plant meltdown has torn apart close families, leaving elderly relatives isolated and villages uninhabited

More than three years after Japan's Fukushima nuclear disaster more than 120,000 people from the region are living in nuclear limbo with once close-knit families forced to live apart.
Click to expand...

http://www.theguardian.com/world/20...-disaster-japan-three-years-families-uprooted
 
Barking_Mad said:
As an item of interest...Photos from Sellafield plant and storage of nuclear waste...

http://www.theguardian.com/environm...-nuclear-radioactive-risk-storage-ponds-fears
Click to expand...

Interesting stuff, not surprised to see them in such a sorry state, nor that they have attracted so little attention despite all of the sudden attention given to spent fuel pools in the wake of Fukushima.

Speaking of which, 1320 out of 1331 spent fuel bundles in the Fukushima reactor 4 pool have now been transferred, unsurprisingly unaffected by the scaremongering bullshit that some directed at 4 pool for a few years until it no longer served their agenda. The 11 spent bundles that remain include the 2 leaking and one bent bundle that were previously disclosed (damaged in the past, not during the disaster), and it will be interesting to see how they manage to deal with those. Another 180 bundles still in the pool are of unused fuel, which is so much easier to handle.
 
Well the embedded Vice video isn't too bad for what its supposed to be, relatively short and attention grabbing. The text on that true activist site is much too short and dramatic to count as good in my book.

I disagree with a final statement in the Vice video, that the coverups have made this (or potentially made it) the worst nuclear disaster. No, a load of mistakes before and during the disaster already made this one the worst, in a number of different respects. Subsequent coverups have the potential to make certain impacts worse, but its more complicated than they suggest.

I'd put it like this. Just as the nuclear meltdowns came about by a combination of failings, so quite a combination of particulars about Japan conspire to make the way the disaster is dealt with much less than ideal. For example:

Certain cultural, social, political and economic factors in Japan. Theres a depressing number of these, though I don't feel like getting into them right now.
Lack of abundant fossil fuels.
Lack of spare land.
The sheer scale of the contamination.

Add in the PR etc pressure you'd get with a disaster anywhere in relation to the global nuclear industry, especially given the timing of the disaster in relation to the cycle of investment, planning & political nuclear plant, both in relatively new nuclear nations and those facing the closure of their first generations of plant, and the potentially staggering scale of the decarbonisation agenda this century, and its no wonder we aren't hearing more.

There is another reason we don't hear more, probably the same reason this thread isn't too lively these days. There isn't a lot of news to grab attention, and thats not just because of TEPCO being shy with information, its because nothing has exploded for three and a half years. The status of the site could always change dramatically at some point, but unless it does the stories now are long, drawn out agonising affairs, as the implications echo on for decades to come. If I am sometimes too unforgiving of dramatic stories that attempt to whip up a sense of immediacy to Fukushima again, its both because they are usually wrong, danger teases, and because I'm interested in the long drawn out stories and potential discussions.
 
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